Bad Day For a Meeting

When I scheduled a meeting with HonestReporting’s wunderkind graphic designer to make a mockup of what Backspin will look like (this is not the final look), nobody had an inkling that a decade’s worth of Palestinian documents would be leaked to the press, and that Hezbollah would choose Lebanon’s next Prime Minister all in the same day.

While I’m thrilled with the design we came up with, I have other things off my chest:

• PA police participated in a protest against Al Jazeera at the network’s Ramallah HQ. Can you imagine the headlines if Israeli police participated in a violent protest at, say, the BBC’s Jerusalem bureau?

• The NY Times proves that imitation is the highest form of flattery. The Gray Lady’s mulling an “EZ pass lane for leakers” — an electronic drop box if you will — for anyone who wants to give the paper large volumes of confidential documents. Besides eliminating Julian Assange the middleman, the NYT’s competing with (I’m not making this up) the Al Jazeera Transparency Unit, which is taking user-generated content to dizzying heights.

• Who knew Queen Rania’s Holocaust denial, 9/11 conspiracy mongering, and extremist anti-Israel posts on Facebook were flying under everyone’s radar for so long? Thumbs up to Memri for documenting everything. If she didn’t have the royal title, a veneer of moderation, and a flashy smile, she’d have run afoul of Facebook by now.

• No question, David Frum had the day’s most prescient take on the PaliLeaks:

The Palestinian leaks show the Palestinian Authority leadership trying to work their way to the answer that “everybody knows.”

But the secrecy surrounding the documents — and the reaction to the leak — confirms the Israelis’ worst fear: The Palestinian population does not, in fact, “know” what “everybody knows.” And a Palestinian leadership that did “know” what “everybody knows” is now being reviled by its own population as traitors and sell-outs.

• Houses deliberately mined by the bad guys? The good guy are demolishing unprecedented numbers of homes to save soldier’s lives? Sorry Afghanistan, but scorched earth is only condemned when the IDF does it in Gaza.